What You Learn When You Zoom Out

What details most powerfully affect the whole: This helps you troubleshoot and adjust, but also understand what details are important to focus your time and attention on, and which are not.

How the consumer sees the organization and it’s message overall.

If all operations and tactics create a complete and attractive picture.

Cohesiveness and flow.

Learning to Zoom

Unfortunately, a communications strategy isn’t like a photo on your phone.

You can’t just roll your fingers over it and zoom in or out, but you can deliberately and consistently take time to practice this exercise on your own.

For example, I tend to do this weekly when we put together client dashboard and review the success metrics we track.

I look at the data and zoom in to the red flags or opportunities.

Then I zoom out and look at the whole again.

I continue this process, following the different paths my “zoom investigations” might find, until I have a sense of what’s going on at the zoomed in level, and how it affects the zoomed out bigger picture.

I also self-check myself this way when my often OCD perfectionist nature finds me spending a lot of time on something at the zoomed in level….I stop, take a deep breath and zoooooom on out to see how that detail, which I’m devoting so much time and energy on, affects the big picture and overall goal.

Is the picture the same (both now and in the future)? If so, I decide how much value the time spent agonizing over the detail provides.

If not, I zoom back in and dig deeper into what can be done to resolve the glitches of that detail and improve the bigger picture (as well as how that will affect the details around it).

By zooming in and out of your communications strategy often and with intention. You’ll be able to better prioritize your time, resources, and tasks, as well as see opportunities and obstacles you might have missed by only looking at one level.

About Laura Petrolino

Laura Petrolino is the chief client officer at Arment Dietrich, an integrated marketing communications firm. She also is a weekly contributor to the award-winning PR blog, Spin Sucks. Join the Spin Sucks community.